Oracle, looks like your revenues were down. 'Cloud! Cloud! Look at the cloud!' Oracle is pointing to continued growth for its cloud business as the bright side in a quarter that saw the enterprise giant drop revenues slightly, but still top Wall Street expectations. Big Red's fiscal 2016 Q2 numbers ending November 30 were as follows: Total revenues were $8.9bn, down 6 per cent from the $9.5bn haul over …
"If the cloud offerings were really taking off the declines would have been completely offset by gains in the cloud."
I'll let you off on this misconception, as finance rules are not generally very well understood. When you sell a piece of hardware, you get $$$. When you sell software, you get $$$. When you sell a service, you get a bit this year, then a bit next year, and then a bit the following year. Cloud is a service. You may sell $10M in Cloud, but it may be spread out over 5 years, meaning you get $2M this year, $2M the next, and so on.
Cloud is very expensive to get going, for the vendor, but once it's going you have a very consistent revenue stream.
Get a under $5k T7 server that is useful (4+ disks, 10G ethernet) and they can move hardware. They should have a low end $999 appliance to get their new tech in the hands of lots of people or else Solaris 11.3 will be meaningless to the masses and meaningless to business. The $999 box should have 2 hard drive slots and 2x 1G ports and a few cores and all the cool memory cache/compression/crypto stuff. If they don't do it now, they will never reverse their current direction.
You are thinking like an engineer. That is how companies like Sun did so well when they were pushing/practically giving away stuff to universities to get it used and liked by the upcoming generation of computer science students.
Oracle thinks more like a business. As in the business "offer you can't refuse" because your (legal) balls are in the vice and every time Larry asks for more money you just have squeal to ask "How much?"
As a former STK/Sun/Oracle hardware sales rep (left 3 1/2 years ago), I can say Oracle was never interested in low margin business (and I doubt they are now), nor applications outside the Red Stack. There were many opportunities to follow our customers into new application areas, that Sun would have eagerly explored even if not profitable from day 1. Oracle very consistently remains focussed on Red Stack.
Definitely agree with many of the above points. I remember when Sun was making huge profits on their higher end servers, namely the E10k, they still aggressively marketed low end, low margin servers as well. The thing was to get as much Sun products out there as possible. If a small company started out with a few Ultra 10s and expanded, they'd more than likely stick with Sun. That seemed to be the goal, Sun everywhere.
When Oracle purchased Sun, that all changed and low margin products disappeared. Completely different philosophy with Larry's hand on the tiller.
Sun lost the volume server war. Sun was spending so much time and effort on low margin customers, that they ended up getting bought out by Oracle. If they would have been more consistent with Solaris on X86, then it might be Solaris now that owns the X86 Server Market -- instead of Linux.
Oracle is not a low margin vendor. Whether you like them or not, they want to sell a product with high margins. This has resulted in Oracle doing more with SPARC than Sun was doing the last few years. Whether you like/trust Oracle or not, you have to admit they are doing interesting things with SPARC right now. They're even talking about reentering the low end market with Sonoma.
Larry's a very patient guy. I hope he sticks with what he's doing on SPARC.
What does any dot-com do when collection agencies are checking resale values of the office furniture? Illegal spamming, of course, but with a dumb trick to make it seem legal. Create a new customer marketing preference, default it to "spam constantly", and open the floodgates. Recently I've seen these Oracle/Verizon addresses spewing:
mail01.info.mouser.com (142.0.163.126)
mail02.get.comcastbiz.com (204.92.21.44)
I guess Oracle is in worse shape than thought if this is their new plan for short-term revenue.
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